I first discovered the Visitors pattern from reading the original design patterns book, sometime in the last century when, having jumped into computer science, I was busy hoovering up everything I could about programming. After reading the chapter on visitors, it made no sense to me then and I had no real cause to go near them again until I started working on Tawny-OWL (n.d.a) This library includes a renderer which takes a set of OWL API OWLObjects and turns them into Clojure data structures. Originally, I added this simply to generate documentation, but since then it’s grown to have rather a life of its own. In Java, this would be be implemented with a visitor. In Clojure, I implemented this with multimethods which is often used as a replacement for the visitor pattern but I am now far from convinced that this was a good decision, after the performance of my code collapsed massively. In this article, I describe the problems with multimethods, and some alternatives. For each of these, I use a small example, and bench mark them; you can follow my code on https://github.com/phillord/visitor-benchmark. The results are, perhaps, a little surprising. This should be of relevance to anyone addressing the same problem in Clojure.

I was entertained to see the recent publication of a new paper on the definition of function (Röhl and Jansen 2014) I met one of the authors at a meeting a few years back in Durham, and had a very nice discussion about my own contribution to this definition which I published previously (n.d.a)

I’ve noted in the past some of the strange beliefs about DOIs (n.d.a) One of these is that DOIs provide some magic archiving capability (n.d.b) The other is the strange one that “DOIs make things citable”. This was one of the selling points for Figshare, for instance.

I’ve been programming in Clojure for well over a year now; originally, I heard about it care of Sam Aaron, an old PhD student of ours who gave a fun lunch time talk; I rarely go to these (although I probably should). Indirectly, Tawny-OWL came out of this one, so it is good that I went.

I am please to announce the second full release of Tawny-OWL, my library for fully programmatic development of OWL ontologies. Tawny-OWL now has a fairly large feature set and is becoming a rich development environment.